Disinformation and The Year of the Runaways nominated for The Dylan Thomas Prize

Now in its tenth year, the prize is awarded to the best eligible published literary work in English, written by an author aged 39 or under. It is the largest literary prize in the world for young writers, aimed at encouraging creative talent worldwide. It celebrates and nurtures international literary excellence across all genres, and is open to poetry, novels, short stories and drama.

'This is a really exciting and unusually varied shortlist. The books featured have perhaps only one thing in common - literary ambition and the breathtakingly successful execution of their visions, but otherwise they resist categorisation. Structurally, narratively, and linguistically they innovate, breaking down boundaries, reaching the reader in new and unexpected ways.'

The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life.

Sweeping between India and England, and between childhood and the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's generous, unforgettable novel is - as with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance - a story of dignity in the face of adversity and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, and praised for combining 'technical mastery with a lucidity that verges on the hypnotic' (Independent). Leviston's keenly-anticipated second book sees both an intellectual and dramatic intensification of her project. We often credit poetry as a kind of truth-telling, but it can also be an agent and a vessel of disinformation: in the course of making its proofs and confessions, it also seeks to persuade and seduce by any means it can. Leviston uses both sides of poetry's tongue to address one of the key questions of the age: how have we come to know what we think we know?